Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/672

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652
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

In the autumn and following spring field lessons were given on marine zoölogy, the object being to study animals in their natural habitats. Another excursion was made to Woods Hole, Buzzards Bay, and a summer laboratory established for ten days at Goldsborough, Maine, where work similar to that done the previous summer was here carried out. Among the field lessons of the spring of 1899 was an excursion of four days' duration to Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands, where there was an opportunity to study a marine fauna southern in character and different from that found on the Maine coast. On the afternoon of Agassiz's birthday a sail was taken to another of this group of islands—Penikese, the site of the famous summer school. In the evening the class of seventeen persons listened to the reading of selections from the life of Agassiz, poems regarding him, and magazine articles describing events connected with the great meeting in the summer of 1873. The next day an excursion was made to Gay Head, Martha's Vineyard, where the afternoon was spent in studying the wonderfully colored clay cliffs and in searching for fossils. As an outcome of Mr. Grabau's field lessons the Hale House Natural History Club was formed. This club consists of teachers and other persons who have banded together for the study of natural history. Meetings are held twice a month, and similar classes have been formed for children of the neighborhood.

The Teachers' School of Science has been of great assistance to the Boston Normal School by furnishing certain of its pupils with instruction in geology and zoölogy.

In 1893 The Teachers' School of Science took part in the exhibition of elementary science teaching made by certain teachers of the schools of the eastern part of Massachusetts. The school was enabled to take part in this public exhibit through the generosity of Mr. T. A. Watson, a pupil in the school, who paid the necessary expenses.



A collection of articles obtained by the Baron de Baye in a scientific expedition last year to Siberia and the Russian Caucasus contains specimens from very ancient times down. Among them are mammoth bones and chipped flints, like those of the Mousterian period in France, from the Yenisei; arrowheads, like the European and American, from the same region; bronze weapons from the Caucasus; iron arrowheads like those of the Congo; skulls, weapons and ornaments, necklaces of hard, polished, pierced stones, from the Kurgans of the steppes, dating from antiquity down to the beginning of the middle ages; Caucasian jewels, and ceramic ware ancient and modern. A very curious object is one of the statues, called Kamenaia Baba, of a kind supposed to have been set up by the Scythians and always held in veneration, of which the present specimen is the only one yet allowed to go out of Russia.